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As it turns out, men are pretty much hard-wired to like watching or reading about other people having sex. Here's why they do it and why it's probably ok.
Most nights, after his wife, Kate, had gone to bed, Tom surfed the net for porn. Kate learned about this during their second session of couples therapy. Despite Tom's claims that his nocturnal habit had nothing to do with their love life, she worried he preferred porn to having sex with her.
That is a common reaction. "Often, one partner has a porn interest, and the other thinks that's an issue," says Russell Stambaugh, PhD, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based psychologist and sex therapist. "It rarely is. The top studies suggest that directly about 5% of porn users have an issue that interferes with their daily life."
That is great news, because a whole lot of men and women look at porn. Based on a survey through the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 26% of male Internet users visited good adult material [you can try these out] web pages (only 3% of women went to these sites). In 2006, the porn industry raked in nearly 13 billion dollars.
For some women, there is no need to worry. Whatever could possibly be drawing a man to porn, it's seldom a reflection on his partner, says sex therapist Lonnie Barbach, PhD, in practice in San Francisco. "Some women feel threatened while they don't think they're as sexy as a porn star," she says. "But it is not about what he is not getting at home. It's the novelty. It's a turn-on."
Why do so many men like looking at pictures of naked people? That is not an easy question to reply to. Porn-induced arousal has been linked to many parts of the brain. One recent theory holds that mirror neurons, brain cells that fire when an action is performed and additionally when it's observed, play an essential role in male arousal. But knowing what is fired up by porn doesn't tell us why our brains get turned on.
Stambaugh points to evolution. Men's brains, he says, are hard-wired for easy arousal, so that men are ready for sex whenever opportunity knocks -- a propagation-of-the-species thing. With online porn so readily at hand, vicarious opportunities -- cue the mirror neurons -- are ever present.
Once Kate realized that porn was not her replacement and Tom felt less ashamed about his habit, the couple talked more easily about their sex life. And that led to sexy outfits as well as a little experimentation within the bedroom. The porn was never the problem, Stambaugh says. "More ordinarily, the problem is the way you talk and the way you reveal yourself to each other."
